Thanks Figjam, just wanted to introduce you to Vanilla Ice, the swamp cooler! I'm going to probably get a stronger fan and better venting, but for my first time out it did a fine job of keeping my tent bearable.

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CoolerCon was great! Thanks all that showed up in our Pimp Your Bike area to exchange cooler ideas. A big thanks to sjs for putting it together!

And a HUGE thanks to figjam for spreading the word and getting us all into swamp coolers!

Report- My box cooler worked like a dream, more than I expected. An unexpected benefit was how it also removed virtually all the dust from the air, even in a duststorm. Added with the positive pressure from the cooler, I had a virtually dust-free yurt all week.

In my box truck I could run my finger across a surface and not find playa dust, up till about Thursday when my feet dragged most of it in.I can say I was the cleanest I have been in 10 years of BM. Pretty amazed at what the cooler, and a rug int he truck did for keeping me clean all week. Never a tent again. Maybe a Yurt.

Got home with the two gifted store-bought coolers and one of them just leaked water when you turned on the evaporative part. Pulled it apart and found that a section of the water feed hose had melted or caught itself on the fan motor. Replaced that part of the hose with extra BM parts, and I got the second swamp cooler working! Been using it here. It's been like 94F and the cooler has been cooling the house down rather well. No need for AC. The fan rocks on these too. Probably a tiny bit better than the Coolbreeze fan. If I didn't have these guys, I would probably be trying to run my 12v Cooler in the house. I've daydreamed about a truck installation.

So on Esplanade around 4:30 they had an ask a physicist booth. Of course I waited my turn and brought up the subject of swamp coolers and the ol' "where does the heat go?" question we couldn't get straight at cooler con. Anyway, after about 20 minutes all I got out of the conversation was something about the change of states of water to vapor "taking" the heat.

A little more research and I got the clearest answer I could come up with:

heat cant go, it is a form of energy and can only be tranformed into other types of energy. the heat energy is transformed into kinetic energy in the water molecules.

So basically, everything is cool, the only thing changing is the water to water vapor which "takes the heat" and leaves us with cool air and cool water.

I guess it makes sense. Hope that clears some things up for some of you who cared.

The simplest way is to think of boiling water. When you boil water to make steam (a phase change) it takes heat to excite the molecules enough to cause a phase change. Same think happens when you evaporate water, it takes heat to make it happen. This heat comes from whatever the water is "on" this case the air (to keep it simple). thus the evaporation cools the air and also increases the humidity (and density-but thats a tangent). Same thing happens when you sweat, a dog pants, or you pour rubbing alcohol on your skin.

Thanks for Figjam for the ideas and the original design. Worked great but we took a bit of a different route for their use.

I built two AC Bucket swamp coolers because we were going to be taking a quiet gennie anyway (Champion 2000 watt inverter generator). The gennie runs for 9-10 hours on one gallon of gas on the econ setting (550 watt output). Had to modify the bucket design and make it a double level evaporator due to the AC factor and size/depth of the cheap ($15) AC fan. One of the swamp coolers was for evaporating greywater and the other for tent cooling using meltwater. Even though the tent cooler worked great, put out 185 CFM airflow at 68 degrees at 20% humidity into a 460 CF tent, we were actually more comfortable taking our siestas in the afternoon breeze under our white monkey hut laying in our anti-gravity chairs (the white MH always stayed cool to the touch, even during the hottest part of the day). Consequently we ended up just using them both for greywater evaporators to the open air, not for tent or closed space cooling. We had a giant funnel with a screen filter in it to catch food particles/hair/etc that we threw in our trash before we loaded the evaporators. Playa dust didn't make any difference at all.

One of the evaporators had a 92 gph pump and the other a 252 gph pump. The smaller pump evaporator could evap about 3/4 gallon per hour and could draw the water down to about 1/2 inch in the bottom bucket. The 252 gph pump version was evaporating twice as much due, probably due to better element saturation but could only draw the water down to about 1 1/4 inches before it started sucking air. We were evaporating 3.5 to 4 gallons of grey water a day so the gennie only ran for less than two hours a day. Typically we waited until the RVs around us turned on their LOUD generators in the afternoon before we turned on our quiet one. Couldn't even hear ours with the RV generators running.

We ended up bringing about 1.5 gallons of greywater home. Next year I'll add a third level to the evaporator, putting the larger pump in a small sump that will maximize the water catch, leaving only a cup or less of unevaporated greywater.

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You are always smaller than anything that upsets you. Remain calm and solutions with boundless possibility will find your heart.

that's fine if you don't mind the smell. no personal experience, but i've heard stories . . . i have very clean cooler water since i started loading my ice into gallon ziploc bags, also any open perishable food, either in bags or sealed containers. now what water does seep into the bottom of my coolers is fresh and clean, although a bit dusty.

FIGJAM wrote:The Harbor Fraight solar fountain pump is OK for the bucket cooler and I have'nt had any reports of failure, but any cloudiness or dust on the panel and they quickly become inefficiant.

YMMV. HF products in general are inferior. I've had too many defective products from them to consider the savings worth it. Chinese factories can make good merchandise, but they only bother to when they are contracted by a real brand name who has to stand by the products and requires the quality.

Both the pumps mentioned above in the coolers used for grey water evaporators were HF pumps. Grey water was, well, grey water, though filtered to remove particles, and there was a ton of dust in the evaporators. The HF pumps worked perfectly all week. I had one spare 92 gph spare just in case. It is still a spare.

You are always smaller than anything that upsets you. Remain calm and solutions with boundless possibility will find your heart.

Couldn't get dura-cool pads at HD Reno this year.Manager of section said they stopped reordering them (and other cooler parts/supplies) partway through the summer, so they're usually long gone by mid August.

Lowe's in Fernley was another story. Pads & rolls in stock. Photos taken on Sept. 3rd.

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Jar Jar Sith Lord.Odd. No bears in the dump. Oh well, lets go across the road & pick blueberries..... but don't harm the red dragon that frequents the area from time to time. He and I have an agreement.

Wow, does this thing move the water. Plus, it's remote controlled. I had to increase the plastic tubing size to get the increased flow. Should work really well, plus the battery back up and bigger solar panel is awesome.

question 1) what is the best way to cut the hole in the lid to place the fan? will just a box cutter do?

question 2+) i am a total idiot when it comes to batteries. can someone please? explain in the simplest of terms how to get power from a battery to the pump and fan? what equipment is needed? do you have to solder?

While researching the physics needed to evaporatively cool a 30 foot dome, I found something I would like to share. The total cooling effect is 890 btu per pound of water evaporated. A gallon of water is 8.3 lbs. So for the folks who are getting a gallon per hour of evaporation, you are creating 7,400 btu of cold.

Put another way: Figjam's V2.0 is creating the same amount of cooling as a small A/C unit from Homeless Despot.

Pretty impressive.

Something else to throw into the communal hat for when Figgy gets the itch to experiment again: insulate the water reservoir. The heat gain into an uninsulated reservoir accounted for 6-7% of overall losses in an experiment at the Univ of Idaho.

Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care NOT who writes this nation’s laws. ... S.J. Perelman